Teaching Gender Equality through Serial Drama: A Case Study of Irish Education

Abstract | Abstract

In Ireland, there is increasing and well-founded concern about how media could be negatively shaping young people’s attitudes towards gender equality, especially the role of social media in propagating an anti-gender backlash among young males. If today people live ‘in’ rather than ‘with’ media, it is important to address gender issues through and in media.  This article presents findings from secondary school teacher interviews and student focus groups conducted in Ireland as part of the GEMINI research project to explore the possibilities of teaching gender issues through television serial drama. Teachers report challenges like curriculum limitations, a lack of teacher training, a fear of anti-gender backlash, and poor media literacy development. Furthermore, while some media literacy education was taught, teaching of serial drama is virtually non-existent in Irish secondary schools. Overall, the student’s interest in serial drama rarely extended to Irish shows, with Normal People, The Young Offenders and Derry Girls being the exceptions. These three Irish serial dramas provide rich and varied material for teaching issues such as youth sexuality, gender stereotypes and queer representation to students. Finally, drawing from GEMINI’s online toolkit of teaching resources, the project’s “GMN Triangle” will be used as a visual paradigm to illustrate how key sequences from the series Normal People can be analysed by focusing on the three core teaching modes of media literacy, narrative devices, and gender issues.